The MIDI Association has made significant progress this year in developing some Profiles focused on electronic drums and drum machines.
The Default Drum Map Profile defines a MIDI-CI Profile for a default mapping of specific drums to specific Note Numbers. The note map used in this Profile was established by many products in the 1980s as a commonly used set of note assignments for drum sounds and that was later standardized in General MIDI.
Many drum machines, grooveboxes, keyboard workstations, portable keyboards, digital pianos, and software synthesizers (many of which do NOT support the full GM specification) have drum kits that utilize this drum kit mapping because of the vast quantity of MIDI data available that will play properly with these drum maps.
Electronic Drums are one of the most successful categories of MIDI instruments.
Most electronic drums from different manufacturers share a common set of features (standard MIDI messages including velocity, pan,etc.) as well as more drum specific features (choking of cymbals, positional sensing of cymbals and drums, etc). However, the MIDI messages used to control these features have not been standardized and mainly rely on manufacturer specific SysEx. A MIDI-CI Profile would define far greater interoperability, unifying the industry behind a common set of MIDI messages.
Steve Fisher- Director – Drums Product Development Medeli
Ben Israel- Research and Content Design Manager -Yamaha
Mike Kent- Chair of MIDI 2.0 WG/MIDI Association Executive Board.Drum Profile Chair Co Founder Amenote,
Mike Snyder -Innovation Manager, Electronic Instruments at Avedis Zildjian Company
Ikuo Kakehashi- Founder of BAC Audio a team of master electronic instrument engineers who worked on Zildjian’s new ALCHEM-E series electronic drum kits,
